THEORY OF SOCIETY VOLUME 2

By Niklas Luhmann, Rhodes Barrett

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 1997 Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7160-3

Contents

4. Differentiation…………………………………………………15. Self-Descriptions……………………………………………….167Notes…………………………………………………………….351Index to Volume 2………………………………………………….439Index to Volume 1………………………………………………….447

CHAPTER 1

Differentiation

1. System Differentiation

Since its inception, sociology has been concerned with differentiation.The term alone deserves attention. It stands for the unity (or establishmentof the unity) of difference. Older societies, too, had naturallyobserved differences; they distinguished between town dwellers and countrydwellers, between nobles and peasants, between the members of onefamily and those of another. But they were satisfied to note the differingqualities of beings and ways of life and to form corresponding expectations,as they also did in dealing with things. The concept of differentiationallowed a more abstract approach, and this step toward abstraction is likelyto have been caused by the nineteenth-century tendency to see unities anddifferences as the outcome of processes—whether of evolutionary developmentsor (as in the case of politically united “nations”) of purposive action.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this concept of differentiationmade it possible to switch from theories of progress to structuralanalysis, while nevertheless adopting the economist’s belief in the productivenessof the division of labor. Talcott Parsons’s general theory of the actionsystem still built on this concept, which offered a key formula bothfor analyzing development (increasing differentiation) and for explainingmodern individualism as the result of role differentiation. It led GeorgSimmel to analyze money, Émile Durkheim to reflect on changes in theforms of moral solidarity, and Max Weber to develop his concept of the rationalizationof different orders of life such as religion, the economy, politics,and eroticism. The dominance of the differentiation concept provesuseful precisely because it does not exclude seemingly disparate theoreticalapproaches—to development, to individuality, to value criteria—butrather gives access to them. In sum, differentiation is necessary to maintaincohesion under conditions of growth.

The differentiation concept enabled modern society to admire andcriticize itself. It could regard itself as the irreversible outcome of historyand look to the future with a great deal of skepticism. For Simmel as forWeber, highly developed “form” is a correlate of differentiation, as is theemergence of individuality for practically all the classical sociologists. Atthe same time, however, form is not to be had without a disturbing loss ofmeaning: it always involves restriction and renunciation; and individualitydoes not make the individual what he would like to be, but producesthe experience of alienation. Together with individual particularity, awarenessdevelops of what this particularity does not entail, generating, sincethe end of the nineteenth century, various theories of a plural self, of conflictbetween personal and social identity, or of contradictory socialization.

This overdetermination through connectivity options is, however, atthe cost of conceptual clarity. I therefore limit the concept to the specialcase of system differentiation, thus making it more difficult to draw overhastyconclusions about individual behavior from structural problems insocietal differentiation. Naturally, this does not prevent us from speakingof role differentiation or differentiated taste, of conceptual differentiation,or of terminological differentiation in a quite general sense. Everythingthat is distinguished can, if we mean the result of the operation, also bedescribed as difference. However, my thesis is that other differentiationsarise from the differentiation of systems and can therefore be explainedby system differentiation; and this is so because every operational (recursive)connection of operations generates a difference between system andenvironment.

If a social system emerges in this manner, I speak of it differentiatingout [ausdifferenzieren] against what this process then makes into the environment.Such outdifferentiation can, as in the case of the societal system,take place in the unmarked space of meaningful possibilities (that can becomeopen to marking only through differentiation), hence in the otherwiseunlimited world. But it can also take place within already formedsystems. This is the only case I shall call system differentiation, or, whenconsidering the difference mentioned, internal differentiation of the systemconcerned.

System differentiation is thus nothing other than recursive system formation,the application of system formation to its own result. The system inwhich further systems arise is reconstructed by a further distinction betweensubsystem and environment. From the perspective of the subsystem, therest of the comprehensive system is now environment. For the subsystemthe overall system now appears to be the unity of the difference betweensubsystem and subsystem environment. In other words, system differentiationgenerates intrasystemic environments. To employ a now familiar term,we are dealing with the “reentry” of the distinction between system and environmentinto what has been distinguished, into the system.

It is important to understand this process with the necessary precision.It does not involve the decomposition of a “whole” into “parts,” in eitherthe conceptual sense (divisio) or the sense of actual division (partitio). Thewhole/part schema comes from the old European tradition, and if appliedin this context would miss the decisive point. System differentiation doesnot mean that the whole is divided into parts and, seen on this level, thenconsists only of the parts and the “relations” between the parts. It is ratherthat every subsystem reconstructs the comprehensive system to which itbelongs and which it contributes to forming through its own (subsystem-specific) difference between system and environment. Through system differentiation,the system multiplies itself, so to speak, within itself throughever-new distinctions between systems and environments in the system.The differentiation process can set in spontaneously; it is a result of evolution,which can use opportunities to launch structural changes. It requiresno coordination by the overall system such as the schema of the whole andits parts had suggested. Nor does it require all operations carried out in theoverall system to be distributed among subsystems, so that the overall systemcan then operate only in the subsystems. Even a highly differentiatedsociety allows a great deal of “free” interaction. The consequence is a differentiationof societal system and interaction systems that varies with the differentiationform of society.

The differentiation process can thus begin somewhere or other andsomehow or other and reinforce the deviation that has arisen. One settlementamong many comes to be preferred where the advantages of centralizationare mutually reinforcing, so that finally a new distinction developsbetween town and country. It is only this development that makes other settlementsinto “villages” as opposed to the town, villages that gradually adjustto the idea that there is a town where people can live differently than in thevillage and that, as the environment of the village, modifies its possibilities.

In the context of system differentiation, every change is therefore adouble, indeed, multiple, one. Every change to a subsystem is also a changeto the environment of other subsystems. Whatever happens, happens inmultiplicity—depending on the system reference. Thus a rapid declinein the demand for labor in the economy brought on by economic developmentsor competition can induce an increase in rationality and efficiency,while in the political system, in the families affected, in the educationalsystem of schools and universities, or as a new subject of research for scholars(“the future of work”) it can set off quite different causal series on accountof changes in the environment of these systems. Even though it is thesame event for all systems! This sets off enormous dynamization, almostexplosive reactive pressure, against which single subsystems can protectthemselves only by erecting high thresholds of indifference. Differentiationtherefore necessarily increases both dependence and independence underthe specification and systemic control of the aspects in which one is dependentor independent. As a result, subsystems develop exclusively as operationallyclosed autopoietic systems.

Switching from the whole-part schema to that of system-environmentin analyzing society facilitates the coordination of systems theory and evolutiontheory. It provides better insight into the morphogenesis of complexity.It shows more precisely how unity can reenter itself by means ofdistinctions; and it leaves completely open how many such possibilitiesthere are, and whether and in what form they can be coordinated.

In many other regards, too, systems theory offers a greater wealth oflogical structure than the tradition of thinking in wholes and parts. It can(and must), for example, distinguish between system-environment relationsand system-system relations (tradition knows only the latter). Onlywith the distinction between system and environment does the system capturethe unity of the world or the unity of the comprehensive system, andit does so by means of a self-referential distinction. With system-system relations(e.g., between family and school) it captures only segments of theworld or of society. However, it is this very segmentariness that makes it possibleto observe the given other system as system-in-its-own-environmentand hence to reconstruct the world or society from the perspective of observingobservations (second-order observation). In the environment ofother systems, the system that observes them is also to be found. The overallsystem that opens up these perspectives thus puts pressure on itself, soto speak, to reflect.

In the system-system relations permitted by a societal order of differentiation,only such structural couplings can exist that do not cancel outthe autopoiesis of subsystems. This is true, for example, of relations betweenvillagers in segmentary societies, and for relations between castes orestates of birth [Geburtsstände] in hierarchical orders, and, in much morecomplex and complicated forms, also of relations between the functionalsystems of modern society. What functions as structural coupling in relationsbetween subsystems is, however, also a structure of the comprehensivesystem of society. This justifies describing societal systems above all interms of their form of differentiation, for this is the form of structure formationthat determines and limits what structural couplings between subsystemsare possible.

Finally, switching from the whole-part schema to the system-environmentschema changes the value of the “integration” concept. In oldEuropean thinking, there was no special term for this, for integration of theparts was presupposed in the wholeness of the whole as ordinata concordia[well-ordered concord], and expressed with regard to single phenomena astheir nature or essence. Classical sociology reformulated the problem as amore or less regular relationship between differentiation and integration.Differentiation, it was claimed, could not be carried to the extreme of completeindifference. “Quelques rapports de parenté,” in Durkheim’s view,followed alone from the circumstance that the differentiation of a systemwas at issue. Parsons put it this way: “Since these differences are conceivedto have emerged by a process of change in a system … the presumption isthat the differentiated parts are comparable in the sense of being systematicallyrelated to each other, both because they still belong within the samesystem and, through their interrelations, to their antecedents.” The conceptof integration is, however, mostly left undefined, and, as critics havepointed out, ambiguous. Inadequately considered premises for consensusoften feed into the empirical conditions for integration. As a result, theterm continues to be used to express perspectives of unity or even expectationsof solidarity and to urge appropriate attitudes—in the old Europeanstyle! The historical process is described as one of emanation: out ofhomogeneity comes heterogeneity, and heterogeneity replaces homogeneityby requiring differentiation and integration at the same time. Undersuch circumstances, mobility is often claimed to assume the function ofintegration, and “mobilization” is therefore considered one of the crucialrecipes for modernization policy in developing countries (as long as thechaotic consequences of migration and urbanization do not demonstratethe contrary).

However, a normative concept that promotes or at least approves ofintegration must face growing opposition in societies that are becomingmore complex. Retaining such a concept imposes paradoxical or tautological,self-implicative formulations. Communication of the precept (andhow else is it to become reality?) will provoke more “noes” than “yesses,”so that the hope of integration finally leads to rejection of the society inwhich one lives. What then?

To avoid such overinterpretation, I take integration to mean no morethan reduction in the degrees of freedom of subsystems due to the externalboundaries of the societal system and the internal environment of this systemthey define. For every autopoietic system that differentiates out generatesinternal indeterminacies, which structural developments can eitheraugment or reduce. Under this definition, integration is hence an aspectof dealing with or using internal indeterminacies at the level of both theoverall system and its subsystems.

Unlike the societal system, its subsystems have two environments:that external to society and that internal to society. So defined, integrationis neither a value-laden concept nor “better” than disintegration. Nordoes it refer to the “unity” of the differentiated system (which, purely interms of conceptual logic, follows from the fact that, although there canbe more or less integration, there cannot be more or less unity). Integrationis hence not commitment to a unity perspective, let alone a matter of”obedience” on the part of subsystems to central authorities. It lies, not inthe relation of “parts” to the “whole,” but in the shifting, also historicallyvariable adjustment of subsystems to one another. Degrees of freedom canbe restricted by the conditions of cooperation, but even more strongly byconflict. The concept is therefore not directly concerned with the differencebetween cooperation and conflict: it is superordinate to this distinction.The problem of conflict is the excessive integration of subsystems,which mobilize more and more resources for the dispute, withdrawingthem from other fields; and the problem of a complex society is then toensure sufficient disintegration.

Such restriction can develop where connections come into play—connectionsbetween operations or connections between operations andstructures—without consensus being required. This saves attention inpsychic systems and the coordination of intentions in the social system.The “restriction” is not noticed. This is a relief. On the other hand, itmakes any change to the “tacit collective structure,” as it is often called,more difficult. Accidents or failures are often needed to produce awarenessthat reliance had been placed on coordination that had not necessarilyoccurred.

If we look into the conditions for integration/disintegration, weultimately encounter a temporal relation. For everything that happens(if considered from a temporal point of view) happens simultaneously.The consequence is, first, that simultaneous events cannot mutually influenceor control one another; for causality requires a time differencebetween cause and effect, hence a crossing of the temporal boundariesof what happens simultaneously. On the other hand, the unity of anevent, an accident, an action, an eclipse of the sun, or a thunderstormcan take very different forms depending on the interests of observers. Itis not necessary to heed system boundaries. Tabling a budget in parliamentcan be an event in the political system, in the legal system, in thesystem of the mass media, and in the economic system. This means thatintegration takes place continuously in the sense of the mutual restrictionof the degrees of freedom enjoyed by systems. But this integrationeffect is limited to single events. As soon as we take account of prehistoryand consequences, as soon as we thus cross the time boundaries of whathappens simultaneously and take recursions into account, the magneticfield of the system acts on identification; the legal act of introducingthe draft budget is then something other than an occasion for reportsand comments in the media, something other than the political symbolizationof consensus and dissent, something other than what the stockmarkets perceive. In the pulsation of events, systems integrate and disintegratethemselves from one moment to the next. If repeated and thenanticipated, this may influence the structural development of the systemsinvolved. Humberto Maturana speaks of “structural drift.” But theoperational basis for integration/disintegration remains the single event,which is identified simultaneously at a given moment in a number of systems.No action can be adequately planned, no communication successfullylaunched without mastering this complicated mechanism, howeverbiased the interest-driven and systemically conditioned contributionsmay prove to be.
(Continues…)Excerpted from THEORY OF SOCIETY VOLUME 2 by Niklas Luhmann, Rhodes Barrett. Copyright © 1997 Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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